Have a wonderful winter! (Fall Week 6)

Meet this week’s vegetables
(with storage tips!)

Wow. We can hardly believe we made it. Twenty-six weeks ago we met with all of you here at Seven Spoken Farm for the first time as a CSA, and now we have completed our first season of growing! We’ve had such fun with the CSA this year. It’s been such a full, eventful, and wonderful season that we feel like we should be giving out yearbooks to sign!

Once again, thank you all for trusting us this our first year as a farm and CSA. We hope that you enjoyed your experience this year as well. We sent out our brochures this weekend, so if you had a positive experience and would like to do it all again, you now have the chance to sign up officially for 2007! We’ve already received a few sign-ups, but the season is almost entirely open still. Spread the word, especially if you were satisfied with our offerings!

In the meantime, we imagine some of you might be curious about what farmers such as ourselves do during the winter. To be honest, we’re still a little curious about this too. This will be our first ‘off’ season since starting our own farm (we were in graduate school while working at Cedarville Farm in Bellingham, so there was no downtime then). Since we still have much work to do in establishing the farm (and moving to Grand Island), this winter is unlikely to be as restful as we hope for the future.

For example, this winter we are planning to build a house. Yes, build a house. Everytime we tell people about this plan, we feel a little sheepish, as though we’re budding writers saying, “Tomorrow I’m going to write a novel.” We know this is a big deal. (Trust us, we know.) Fortunately, we have much support—some of which continually astounds us. Our plans are modest as well. We have good frugal genes, and we’re hoping they help us make this project possible. We’ll keep you posted (and update the blog with stories and photos all winter too).

Other farming projects will fill our time too, most of which are more in line with future winter work: rebuilding our hot house and field house; making some implements for the tractor; putting together our seed order; completing our organic recertification forms for Oregon Tilth; attending various fun farming conferences; planning crop rotations and planting schedules; etc.

Of course, for us at Oakhill Organics, winter means something different than it might on another farm. As we continue to meet our goals of almost year-round production, our life will quiet in the winter but continue to plod on with small harvests, early plantings, etc. We know that some farmers intentionally have resisted season extension because of how it eats into that important break time. (And then again, farmers in areas like Wisconsin have no choice since the ground is frozen for months at a time.)

We’ll see how we feel about extending our work period later, but from our perspective now it feels like we’re going to trade benefits. Some farmers who take the winter off from growing have intense, crazy summers involving lots of hired labor, endless harvests and marketing. By extending our season, we hope to also keep summer more manageable. Our goal is to spread out our income earning potential to maximize what just two of us can do reasonably each day. That’s the goal anyway, based on role models such as Eric and Anne Nordell (horse farmers in Pennsylvania who write a great column in Small Farmer’s Journal). We don’t want to level out the year’s workload in order to ignore natural cycles; we just want them to look different—a little more mellow in their curves and with a more continuous flow of food from the farm to you.

This winter, in addition to all our other plans, we hope we can also find the time to drink tea, cook yummy meals, read lots of books, visit with friends, sit by the fire, sleep in, and cuddle with the resident cats at the farm where we’re staying while we build our house. In the end, these are the defining winter moments for us.

We hope that you too enjoy many defining moments this season, whether it be at a holiday meal with family or outside on the slopes. Even though we are grateful for the upcoming rest, we are already excited about rejoining you next spring in this business of growing and eating local vegetables. Being your farmers has been our honor and pleasure. As always, thank you. And, until spring, enjoy the vegetables!

Your farmers,

Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics

P.S. To help you get through at least the first few weeks of winter’s eating, we’ve given out a ‘bumper crop’ of veggies (and included some longer-term storage tips in the newletter).